Phoenix was square and straight, boxy and boxed in, and above all, fake.
She snuggled into bed with them, looking up from time to time, saying she was sorry, she knew she should be doing something more productive, but like Dad, she had her addictions, and one of hers was reading.
I could hear people around us whispering about the crazy drunk man and his dirty little urchin children, but who cared what they thought?
She was keeping it, she explained, to replace the wedding ring her mother had given her, the Dad had pawned shortly after they got married. ‘But Mom,’ I said, ‘that ring could get us a lot of food.’ ‘That’s true,’ Mom said, ’but it could also improve my self-esteem. And at times like these, self-esteem is even more vital than food.
I was sitting in a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through a Dumpster. It was just after dark. A blustery March wind whipped the steam coming out of the manholes, and people hurried along the sidewalks with their collars turned up. I was stuck in traffic two blocks from the party where I was heading.
The reason Dad was having a tough time getting steady work – as he kept trying to tell us – was that the electricians’ union in Phoenix was corrupt. It was run by the mob, he said, which controlled all the construction projects in the city, so before he could get a decent job, he had to run organized crime out of town. That required a lot of undercover research, and the best place to gather information was at the bars the mobsters owned. So Dad started spending most of his time in those joints.
He never said anything, but I think he figured that, as when we were kids, we both stood a better chance if we took on the world together.
Don’t be someone else’s little cheerleader”, Mom said. “Be the star of your own show. Even if there’s no audience.
He hired me on the spot for forty dollars a week, in cash. I was thrilled. It was my first real job. Babysitting and tutoring and doing other kids’ homework and mowing lawns and redeeming bottles and selling scrap metal didn’t count. Forty dollars a week was serious money.
You busted your snot locker pretty good.
I’d never met a man I would rather spend time with. I loved him for all sorts of reasons: He cooked without recipes; he wrote nonsense poems for his nieces; his large, warm family had accepted me as one of their own.
What I wanted to say was that I knew Eric would never try to steal my paycheck or throw me out the window, that I’d always been terrified I’d fall for a hard-drinking, hellraising, charismatic scoundrel like you, Dad, but I’d wound up with a man who was exactly the opposite.
From the time the Joshua tree was a tiny sapling, it had been so beaten down by the whipping wind that, rather than trying to grow skyward, it had grown in the direction that the wind pushed it. It existed now in a permanent state of windblowness, leaning over so far that it seemed ready to topple, although, in fact, its roots held it firmly in place.
She loved the dry, crackling heat, the way the sky at sunset looked like a sheet of fire, and the overwhelming emptiness and severity of all that open land that had once been a huge ocean bed.
She knew how to get by on next to nothing.
I was torturing the fire, giving it life, and snuffing it out.
A little while after we’d moved into the depot, we heard Mom and Dad talking about buying us kids real beds, and we said they shouldn’t do it. We liked our boxes. They made going to bed seem like an adventure.
Rich city folks, he’d say, lived in fancy apartments, but their air was so polluted that they couldn’t even see the stars.
I didn’t have the answers to those questions, but what I did know was that I lived in a world that at any moment could erupt into fire.
The scar meant that I was stronger than what had tried to hurt me.
Sometimes the so-called law is nothing but the haves telling the have-nots to stay in their place.